The amount of information generated and available in today's environment tends to be overwhelming. The most important information to an individual is the information that he/she has examined and determined to be useful to him/her. Today, most important information is available or passes through electronic form, even though it may ultimately be distributed primarily in printed form. When information is received electronically, such information takes little physical space and may be indexed manually or using an automatic index and classification system so that it may be stored and retrieved at a later time. However, when the information is printed, it is often inconvenient or difficult to connect the printed information with its electronic counterpart. This may be true even if the individual printed the information from its electronic form, such with a personal printer.
Often, the individual receiving the information may wish to read it and keep it for future reference, but does not have the opportunity to read the information when it is received. For example, people may quickly review a magazine and bend down page corners of interesting articles or rip out the articles, often reading only headlines or a one to two paragraphs of the article. Items of interest, such as travel, ornithology, enology, viticulture and gardening may be placed on a countertop in a “holding” pattern, stacked in piles, put in boxes and folders, and moved several times before either being filed in a huge, often unsorted, pile or folder to be read at some future date, or filed in the trash.
Many people have no time for categorizing and organizing this saved information, and it ends up in a growing number of piles, often with years worth of unsorted information that is difficult to access in an efficient manner. Hence, the original purpose of saving the article for later reference or reading is defeated. For example, consider the subject of travel. An individual may sort all travel articles into a folder; if not, the travel articles are all mixed up in multiple places. Among the mass of saved articles, there may be an article on “The Best Places to Stay in Hawaii”, another article on “Maui's Best Molokini Excursions”, and many other articles on Europe, Tahiti, and the Virgin Islands.
If the family desires to go to Maui, finding the needed information in the saved articles may present a large task. First, the general location of the travel articles in piles or folders must be determined. Then, if the articles are categorized, the individual must sort through the articles. If the articles were classified rather definitively, under what title would the articles on the places to stay in Hawaii be stored? In a Hawaii folder? Are there sub-folders for each island? If the articles are not categorized, it will be even more difficult since the individual will have to sort the entire pile or box/boxes of articles. Clearly, organizing and retrieving the desired information that may be useful in the future is not a trivial task and is time-consuming.
Thus, there is a need for a method and system to facilitate organizing and retrieving both printed and electronic information efficiently.